Teacher-Data Reactions: Absorbing New Rankings With Caution

When New York City released a trove of data seeking to measure public schoolteachers’ ability to boost student test scores, it touched off discussion among parents who will for the first time be able to access one measure of teacher quality.

Concerns over how parents might use — or misuse — the rankings of thousands of fourth- through eighth-grade teachers drove much a significant part of the debate over the release. The Wall Street Journal, along with other media organizations, published on Friday its own searchable database allowing readers to look up teachers by name and see one measure of how they rank against their peers. Search the database.

Our reporters discussed the data release with parents and educators. Below, some of their reactions to the nearly unprecedented information about schools and teachers that is now available.

A Parent Worries About Cheating — by Teachers

Elizabeth Miller, who has two children at the Brooklyn New School, an elementary school in Carroll Gardens, said she feared the use of student test scores in teacher evaluations would lead to cheating. “Evaluating teachers on their students is really dangerous,” she said, arguing that both teachers and principals will have an incentive to manipulate student test results.

Miller, a mother of three who lives in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, has a child in pre-Kindergarten and another in the second grade; her husband is a New York City high school teacher. She said she will look at the reports for the fourth-grade teachers in her children’s school but won’t use them to make judgments.

“Would I want to form an opinion based on that? No,” said Miller, 43 years old. “I would want to form my opinion from my contact with the school.”

Miller said she worried that an emphasis on student test scores in teacher evaluations could spark a shift in the type of people attracted to teach in New York City. “It’s going to attract a different type of person to become a teacher — a person who is more business-minded,” she said. “I love the teachers at my children’s school. Love them. They really care.”

One Day Makes All the Difference, a Teacher Says

Maura Callan, a fourth grade teacher at P.S. 18 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, supports the concept of a fair teacher-evaluation system to increase accountability. But she worried that the current system doesn’t tell teachers if they are doing their job right — and said she hoped that would change.

“I do believe in evaluating teachers but not on how a 10 year old is going to perform on that one test day,” said Callan, 30 years old, who has been teaching for 10 years. “It doesn’t show what they learned by any means. I don’t feel that shows my effectiveness as a teacher.”

The teacher-ranking system is designed to account for unequal circumstances in students’ backgrounds, but Callan worried the model fails to adequately consider factors like parental involvement. No matter how hard a teacher works, she said time in the classroom often can’t make up for a lack of parental support.

“There is no way to show what you put in for this kids,” Callan said. “You can bend over backwards sometimes, and you still don’t get the results you want.”

Callan said having standardized tests administered several times a year would be a good first step. That could show how children progress through a year and would limit the impact of a student having a single bad test, she said.

But even then, student test scores shouldn’t be the only measurement taken into account to evaluate teachers for tenure, salary or firing purposes, Callan said. Indeed, New York is planning a statewide model that will use tests or other measures of student work for up to 40% of a teacher’s evaluation in the future.

“It’s absolutely, positively ridiculous,” Callan said. “I don’t want my entire career based on how one 10-year-old does that one day.”

A Harlem Teacher Says Rankings Will Be Forgotten

Jon Hoffmeier, a fifth- and sixth-grade math teacher at Knowledge and Power Preparatory Academy IV in Harlem, wasn’t happy after learning that teacher evaluations would become public. But he doesn’t think they’ll have a lasting impact.

“I don’t think it’s going to have much traction,” said Hoffmeier, 56 years old. “Who is going to take the time to look for me?”

The most recent report, from the 2009-10 school year, will have little value for evaluating what’s happening in classrooms now, he said. Instead, the public disclosure about teacher evaluations will just be another example of what he sees as increasingly hostile treatment of teachers — and that doesn’t bode well for the public-school system, he said.

“What do you think will happen when the economy gets good? A lot of teachers are going to leave the profession,” Hoffmeier said. “That’s where it’s going to end up.”

A Manhattan Teacher Distrusts a Quizzical Formula

The formula used to derive teachers’ rankings looks like something off the blackboard in the films “Good Will Hunting” or “I.Q.”

It takes into account previous reading and math test scores. Free- or reduced-price lunch status. Special education status. Whether the student speaks fluent English. How many suspensions and absences students received. Whether the student was held back. Whether they attended summer school. The student’s race and gender.

Then it adjusts for those characteristics for the entire classroom.

The formula is supposed to help adjust for factors outside the teacher’s control. But the formula is so intricate, worried teacher Monica Smith, that parents might misinterpret the information or stop trying to understand it at all.

“I’m just nervous of how people who don’t know what goes into this number will use that information,” said Smith, 30, who teaches sixth grade English and history at New York City Lab Middle School for Collaborative Studies in Chelsea.

Like many teachers, Smith said she distrusted how the Department of Education created the formula and whether it was reliable. “I have a lot of questions about how this is calculated,” she said Smith.

Still, she looked at the good test scores at her school and said they don’t seem to match up with the rankings her colleagues received, which were average.

“There feels like a disconnect there,” Smith said. “I think it puts a lot of weight on one single day of students lives. I don’t think teachers should be evaluated in a snapshot, there should be more of a holistic evaluation system.”